I was only able to finish retop this week due to multiple software problems. Here is the low poly model. The hair ended up being about 35K Tris, which I could probably take lower, however time is my enemy here. Here's all of the breakdowns of the process that I went through, from concept and reference and down to the Retop that I currently have.
I ended up booleaning some additional curls into the mesh after retop, and triangulated and then quadrangulated the mesh to fix the resulting n-gons, which has given me some odd edge flow. Once I've uv'd I'll be trying out baking and see what I need to adjust. I should be able to ACTUALLY finish this in the next 4 days.
Step one, do a test bake of the one clump of hair I completed last week in order to ensure that my methodology was solid.
Step two, do research into the polycount availability that I had left in our game's budget for Persephone to ensure this was a feasible tactic for creating her hair, that wouldn't bog down our engine.
Step three, finish the high poly for the hair around the entire head.
I have accomplished all of these steps this week!
For step one, I simply zremeshed a chunk of her hair, auto-laid out the uv's, and brought the hair chunk into marmoset for baking. There's a handful of baking errors and is shown in ambient light w/o spec, but I'm hopeful from this test that I'll be able to get the look I'm searching for, while remaining in the alotted additional polybudget I have for the character in our game.
With that test completed, I felt confident enough in my findings to continue onwards, and finish the rest of Persephone's hair, which I have displayed much nicer beneath.
And here's a turn table, to get the entire effect
My plan for next week is to retop all of the hair to the best optimization that I can manage for our game's specs and do all of my research into the anisotropic hair shader workflow out of substance painter. Depending on my timeline, I might then place down flats onto her hair, but that is a stretch goal. I've been documenting this process as I go along, so it is very exciting to see it coming to fruition!
This week I set out to create my own IMM brush for making Persephone's hair more true to the actual texture of Black hair. I used Bangalore as reference as well as other real world models. I created 5 variants of curls for a drag-based IMM brush which you can see here.
From there, I referenced the brushes made by Dave Hansen on artstation (https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/yVvl/zbrush-stylized-curls-brush) which were sent to me by Eva (thanks so much!!) in order to toy around with making my own IMM curve brush. From what I could tell, it seemed like he used multiple helixes with different thicknesses and z-offsets, in order to make dual strand combinations. I used this brush in order to be a "gap filler" to give a solid base to drag the more unique curls on top of, giving depth and uniqueness to the hair.
From here, I wanted to test the brushes that I made and modified, and I've been thinking about trying to work ahead of schedule on this project and following ones to give myself extra time for the final assignment. With that in mind, I began to lay down strands and curls onto the original Mesh that I made for Persephone's hair.
Here is the original.
And here is with the first pass of curls, with no sculpting detail aside from a couple of divisions.
This is only the front chunk of her hair, and I am quaking even THINKING about Retopping this.... but things are looking promising, indeed.
